Great Britain and the American Civil War eBook

This was also John Bright’s view. But can
Russell and the Government be criticized even as exercising
an unwise (not unfriendly) haste? Henry Adams
wrote that the British thought the “dissolution
seemed inevitable” and “we seemed to have
made up our minds to it.” Certainly this
was a justifiable conclusion from the events in America
from Lincoln’s election in November, 1860, to
his inauguration in March, 1861—­and even
to a later date, almost in fact to the first week in
April. During this period the British Ministry
preserved a strictly “hands off” policy.
Then, suddenly, actual conflict begins and at once
each side in America issues declarations, Davis on
privateering, Lincoln on blockade and piracy, indicative
that maritime war, the form of war at once most
dangerous to British interests and most likely to draw
in British citizens, was the method first to be tried
by the contestants. Unless these declarations
were mere bluff and bluster England could not dare
wait their application. She must at once warn
her citizens and make clear her position as a neutral.
The Proclamation was no effort “to keep straight
with both sides”; it was simply the natural,
direct, and prompt notification to British subjects
required in the presence of a de facto war.

Moreover, merely as a matter of historical speculation,
it was fortunate that the Proclamation antedated the
arrival of Adams. The theory of the Northern
administration under which the Civil War was begun
and concluded was that a portion of the people of
the United States were striving as “insurgents”
to throw off their allegiance, and that there could
be no recognition of any Southern Government
in the conflict. In actual practice in war, the
exchange of prisoners and like matters, this theory
had soon to be discarded. Yet it was a far-seeing
and wise theory nevertheless in looking forward to
the purely domestic and constitutional problem of
the return to the Union, when conquered, of the sections
in rebellion. This, unfortunately, was not clear
to foreign nations, and it necessarily complicated
relations with them. Yet under that theory Adams
had to act. Had he arrived before the Proclamation
of Neutrality it is difficult to see how he could
have proceeded otherwise than to protest, officially,
against any British declaration of neutrality, declaring
that his Government did not acknowledge a state of
war as existing, and threatening to take his leave.
It would have been his duty to prevent, if
possible, the issue of the Proclamation. Dallas,
fortunately, had been left uninformed and uninstructed.
Adams, fortunately, arrived too late to prevent and
had, therefore, merely to complain. The “premature”
issue of the Proclamation averted an inevitable rupture
of relations on a clash between the American theory
of “no state of war” and the international
fact that war existed. Had that rupture occurred,
how long would the British Government and people have
remained neutral, and what would have been the ultimate
fate of the United States[196]?